The instant invention relates to folding sheets of paper with buckle chutes, and more particularly to sequential folding in half by a buckle chute of a plurality of sheets of paper and the subsequent nesting of the folded sheets of paper into a packet and the insertion of the packet into an envelope.
There presently exists a need in the area of folding of paper sheets by means of buckle chute folders to be able to fold together a relatively large number, such as 10, 20, 30 or more, or paper sheets or documents. This requirement comes about by virtue of businesses, such as utilities or banks or retail stores, having large statements or bills which in many cases may exceed 30 more sheets of paper, most or all of which may need to be folded in order to be inserted into an envelope for mailing to a customer. Typically, the feeding of the sheets of paper, the folding of the sheets of paper, and the insertion of the folded sheets of paper into the envelope are effected by an inserting system comprising documents feeders, conveyors, buckle chute folders and envelope feeders.
A critical limitation with the aforesaid state of the art inserting system is the inability to fold a large number of sheets together simultaneously, in large part due to the high speed of these systems. Some of the most critical limitations are the noise of the sheets of paper entering and leaving the folding rollers and the tremendous force required to maintain pressure of the folding rollers relative to each other as they separate to accept a large number of sheets together.
It is therefor extremely desirable to have a practical solution to the foregoing problem of folding a large number of sheets simultaneously. The instant invention provides such a solution by providing apparatus and a method for half-folding a plurality of paper sheets sequentially and subsequently nesting the half-folded sheets and thereby attaining a result which in terms of quality of fold is superior to simultaneous folding of the same large number of sheets.